Saturday, February 7, 2009

Facebook

I finally caved and signed myself up for Facebook. We'll see how it goes, but for now I would expect that this blog will be used quite a bit less than before.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Hi, I'm Mark, and I'm an idiot.

I finally got so frustrated with my DVD drive not working (I just wanted to watch a movie!) so I booted back into XP, and lo and behold, it doesn't work there either. The drive shows up, but won't recognize a disk. Already sensing that I've made a grade A fool of myself, I shut down the computer and what do you know, the IDE cable has somehow come loose. I pop it back in, boot into 7 Beta and voila! there's my DVD drive. Funny thing is, it still thinks I have a floppy drive as well, so I'm really not sure where that came from. Just goes to show you that the first question should always be: "is it plugged in?"

Monday, January 19, 2009

Windows 7 Beta Update

I've discovered my first major issues with the beta. One of them is a minor inconvenience, the other is bizarre and annoying.

First of all, every time I boot I get a blank screen, the taskbar is a strange textured blue color (but is devoid of any icons and the system tray) and the start menu button is surrounded by black. I can fix this issue by closing and reopening explorer. Not a big deal, easy to work around.

Secondly, after 2-3 boots of working totally fine, my DVD drive disappeared. It was replaced by a floppy drive in the device manager. I've tried uninstalling the floppy drive, floppy controller, IDE controllers, ATA controllers, but each time the end result is that Windows reinstalls them all again with my DVD drive showing up as an unusable floppy drive. It asks me to format the drive and then fails if I try and click format (for obvious reason.) I haven't been able to find any solutions online yet, just a bunch of people who think they're super cool cause they've heard of the UpperFilters optical drive bug. That is not my problem. Anyway, I'll keep researching it and see what happens.

Other than these issues, I love this OS. It runs smooth, fast, and it makes sense. Games run great; I've tested Fallout 3, WoW, and HL2:2 all with no problems and very good framerates. All in all, it still gets a thumbs up from me.

P.S. I used that semi-colon in honor of the late Kurt Vonnegut. I've been reading Apocalypse in Retrospect, a series of writings published after his death by his son Mark.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Moving Forward

I've loaded up the Windows 7 beta on my main machine as of this morning. I did load it on a second harddrive as I'm not entirely willing to wipe out everything I have setup previously, but so far it is treating me well. The UI changes are somewhat minor, although the new taskbar is pretty slick. The ability to easily disable both the UAC and notifications regarding the UAC was very nice, as well as the ability to tweak the notifications you get from the UAC. With my job I have plenty of clients who find the UAC as obnoxious as I do, but also quite a few clients who will benefit from having something in place to make sure they aren't unwittingly destroying their computers on a weekly basis. Aside from the initial setup taking a bit longer than I expected (not really that long, but there was about a 10 minute period where I was just looking at a pretty wallpaper with no windows or text anywhere on the screen) everything has been very smooth. All of my drivers were installed right off the bat, including the up-to-date graphics drivers from Nvidia. So far so good, I'll write more once I've given it more of a test drive.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

2009 Wishlist

There are a number of things I would love to see happen this year, especially things that would substantially differentiate it from 2008. Here they are, in no particular order:

•Joe Mauer hits 20 homeruns
I could wish more broadly for the Twins to win the division/league/series but honestly I think that if Mauer turns up the power a bit we should be in a pretty good position to do any of those other things.

•Brad Childress plays Madden
This may sound strange, but I feel like if he would only learn some very basic play calling and strategy that he would be a great coach. He clearly has some skill interacting with the players and seems to be well liked in the locker room, but the talent on our team would benefit greatly from just a little more of an understanding of situational play-calling.

•National health care plan
Although it hasn't effected me negatively in the last few years due to being lucky enough to have a decent job, family and friends alike have suffered due to a lack of modern, civilized health care. Money should not be a factor when it comes to our citizens being able to be healthy.
So long as we at least make it easier for self-employed persons and small businesses at least it would be a step in the right direction.

I guess that's all for now (I could throw in the obvious things: a beautiful woman, world peace, a billion dollars, but those seem pretty obvious.) More posts to come as I can now easily blog from my blackberry. I heart gadgets.

Friday, January 2, 2009

Dumb People Are Funny

Over at ESPN.com I found this hilarious article listing the top 25 stupid things said by those in the sports world this past year. I'm not sure about the order, but they are all definitely stupid things. My personal favorites are numbers 15 and 25. I think that Roger Clemens should probably not be included because cumulatively everything he says is WAY stupider than anything the other jerks could ever come up with.